The Eventual Demise of WWE

It is clear that this prediction will not occur anytime soon. The demise of WWE will not happen this year or the next. The sleek productions of the McMahon group will last for some time.

However, the collapse of any company does not occur overnight but rather through years of mismanagement.

The death of WCW is the example.

It is hard to imagine an internationally renowned company collapsing as dramatically as it did, but WCW had in fact been in terminal decline for several years. The 2001 buyout sealed its fate.

What killed WCW was a lack of creative direction. The storylines and the wrestling product was not good enough and the fans simply turned off. The WWE was offering a better programme and it won the Monday Night War.

In the wrestling world today, the WWE is selling the same sleek programme, but its quality has fallen. Much has been said about the definition of its era, but in truth the PG nature of the programme is not to blame.

Just as the PG era has had questionable material, so too did the Attitude era.

Wrestling is not defined by an era but rather its wrestlers and its storylines. The PG era may have given us poor promos and even poorer characters but it also gave two legendary Wrestlemania matches with Shawn Michaels and the Undertaker.

Since Wrestlemania, storylines have bordered on the ridiculous and interrupted by constant adverts and PPV placements, the quality of programming has been poor.

The Nexus invasion has got people talking but it surely reminds older wrestling fans of the potential of the WCW invasion angle of 2001 that was severely botched.

Characters too are being rehashed and look poor in comparison: Ted DiBiase (His father), Cody Rhodes (Lex Luger), Randy Orton (Stone Cold), Hawkins and Archer (Shawn Michaels and Diesel).

There is no originality and while Orton may be gaining some momentum as a strong face, his limited character/skills will never reach the heights of Stone Cold in the late 1990s.

WWE needs to look at its creative direction and not to its past. The current success stories are those that have something original either on the mic or as characters. 

The PG era is not to blame. That falls on the creative team at WWE. For WWE to survive, for wrestling to survive, the new era must be defined with sound matches, strong characters and quality feuds.

At present this does not exist.